Luke Lindoe with students.

Calgary Gallerist Virginia Christopher watches over the legacy of this southwestern Alberta iconoclast.

BY Jill Sawyer

Virginia Christopher likes to describe her old friend Luke Lindoe in terms of his uncanny ability with clay. In southwestern Alberta, where he lived off and on for much of his life, he had a knack for searching out the best deposits in an area known for its first-class studio clay. “He had an intuition about water courses,” she says. “He understood the drift of things in the Cypress Hills, he knew where the deposits would end up.” It was a skill that brought him again and again to those arid river valleys around Medicine Hat, where he could range out onto the prairie, searching for dinosaur bones and inspiration for an outpouring of artistic work — sketches, paintings, pots, plates, sculptures.

Christopher knows about the volume of the work, too. A friend of Lindoe’s for 40 years before he died in 2001, she sold his work, contributed to public shows in Calgary and Medicine Hat, became a keeper of stories and a go-between with patrons interested in collecting his work, and for the past seven years has been meticulously documenting and managing his estate. In November, Virginia Christopher Fine Art in Calgary will open a show of Lindoe sculpture and ceramics, one of just a few the gallery has hosted since the artist’s death. It’s important to her to help keep the work out there, to build the value of the estate, but also to make sure this remarkable figure in Canadian ceramics isn’t completely forgotten.

Luke Lindoe was born in 1913 into a world that was primitive and pioneer even by the standards of the time. It was a dot called Bashaw, Alberta, on the road between Ponoka and Donalda, but he didn’t stay there long. Only sketchy biographical information exists on Lindoe, and most of that accompanied two retrospective shows in the 1990s — one at the Nickle Arts Museum in Calgary, and the other at the Medicine Hat Museum and Art Gallery. The catalogue for the 1991 Medicine Hat show, Come Walk With Me, contains a comprehensive interview with the artist, but much of what’s been recorded fades out on the subject of his childhood and early years.

He surfaced definitively in the late 1930s, as a student at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art (now the Alberta College of Art and Design), then at the Ontario College of Art. Over the next 20 years, he would discover his facility with clay, not only as a fine artist, but also in ceramics production (making ashtrays on demand, for example). He worked for other production studios in Medicine Hat, researched the clay, and searched it out for others. He started his own small studio in Calgary with a couple of art school friends, all the while teaching here and there­ — Banff and Vancouver — and continuing to paint, sketch, and do his own creative work in ceramics.

Lindoe had already begun to develop the spare, modern style in both painting and ceramics that he would continue to evolve throughout his life. He was an artist whose work was a perfect match for his time, and much of his creative work had a stylish, mid-century edge that makes it highly collectible today.

He could be temperamental, a trait that Christopher attests to today, and one that dogged him through his life. He abandoned the idea of selling his work, several times, most notably through much of the 1950s. “I resigned from all exhibiting societies in 1952,” Lindoe told Linda Carney of the Medicine Hat Museum in 1992. “I had hit the wall and had neither the wisdom nor the courage to carry on in an environment that I knew was alien to me, but it wasn’t until 1964 or ’65 that I started to get the courage to expose myself artistically again.”

In talking to Carney, Lindoe revealed how much his confidence was shaken by a feeling of not being “fashionable” for his time, a revelation that is remarkable in hindsight, given the style of his work. He had been producing prolifically, exhibiting in international ceramics shows, and gathering up a few high-profile public commissions — including the solemn and gorgeous Neo-Gothic cast concrete Virgin Mary and Christ Child on St. Mary’s Cathedral in Calgary. Later he would design and complete the huge panels that front the Provincial Museum in Edmonton, a recreation of the Plains pictographs found in the Milk River region of southern Alberta.

Lindoe’s studio ceramics and sculpture can be loosely divided into abstract and utilitarian — he was constantly experimenting with vessels and slabs, testing clays and glazes, trying to find the best match between form and material. Alberta artist and curator Les Graff, who wrote the catalogue for Lindoe’s 1998 retrospective at the Nickle, describes it best. “Luke has focused on the concept of a more universal clay vessel, something that grows out of the medium and the process,” he wrote then. “And if it should serve as a plate or a bowl, that’s fine too.”

By the early 1960s, Lindoe was back in Medicine Hat, running a clay production company called Plainsman Clays, and analyzing firing and glazing techniques for the best results (it was during this period that he got and kept a reputation as something of a guru to ceramic artists). It was also at this time that Virginia Christopher met him, through a roommate, Gail, who would become his wife. A student in some ceramics classes Lindoe taught at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art, Christopher says that when she met him, he was doing major sculptural pieces, both figurative and abstract, and building up Plainsman. He was also developing a deep, unshakeable knowledge of kilns and firing.

“He would sit there and sip his vodka and let the air in and out,” she recalls. “He would never leave a kiln alone. He just had an instinct for the firing process.”

His work for Plainsman absorbed a huge amount of Lindoe’s creative time through the 1960s and 70s, and he all but abandoned public exhibition again. He had been disenchanted with the politics of artists’ organizations, and with the loss of several special pieces that had won international art competitions but come back to him broken. He continued to produce, experimenting with form and technique not only in ceramics but also in painting.

His oils at the time, many of them prairie landscapes were pared back, simplified to the point of abstraction — a few rectilinear golden fields, colour subtly shading into colour and disappearing into the horizon, stick-figure birches and fence lines placed in a drift of untouched snow. “I am trying to get that impossible statement about the prairie, and put it all into one painting,” he said about an unsuccessful abstract landscape. “Well, you can’t do it all in one painting. I painted out a bit at a time so that I ended up with just some reds and some grays and some whites.”

He was doing significant abstract sculpture, traveling the world to find new clays, techniques, glazes. In everything, he was discovering the perfect clay form for the concept he had in mind. By the mid 1980s, Lindoe had moved out to Kelowna. He hadn’t shown publicly in a long time, and Christopher travelled out to the Okanagan to try to re-establish a friendship with Lindoe and to potentially set up a business transaction. “I went out to Kelowna and looked as his pots and they were wonderful,” she says. She bought a few pieces, and began the personal and professional connection with him that lasts to today.

By the early 1990s, Lindoe was at the peak of his creative talent, as his health was deteriorating. Back in Medicine Hat by then, he was producing stoneware vessels with advanced glazing techniques. “He set up a kiln and in the last years of his life, the work was just rolling out of him,” Christopher says. “He put everything into his work.” The Medicine Hat Museum began to collect the material for Come Walk With Me, and the time was right for a retrospective. Christopher was showing his work occasionally in her own gallery, and was driving regularly to Medicine Hat to visit the Lindoes and look at new work.

She’s effusive about the volume and quality of creative work that Lindoe was producing in the last ten years of his life, even as Parkinson’s started to creep in and affect the steadiness of his hands. He was experimenting with porcelain clays, celadon and copper glazes, mostly in the refined, handbuilt slab techniques he had been perfecting all his life. His paintings took on a new depth as well, with linear texture and a refinement of simple forms.

“By the late 1990s Luke was just flying,” Christopher says. “He would go into the studio and just make clay. And the ceramics were incredibly, deceptively simple. The ceramics were spectacular.” By this time, Christopher had established the professional relationship with the artist that lasts to this day. Lindoe specified in his will that he wanted her to manage his estate, and she started the process of collecting and cataloguing it and preparing it for sale.

Today, in the back room of her gallery on 11 Avenue in Calgary, a cross-section of Lindoe’s paintings in oil and watercolour traces a lifetime on the prairie, and the subtle shifts in technique that mark each decade. Christopher pulls out a selection of ceramic works ready for the show — including large-scale plates with rich, multi-layered celadon glazes, and the organic ornamentation that he worked with often. Since 2001, Christopher has been documenting everything as it’s sold, with the goal of creating a digital catalogue of his lifetime of work.

Lindoe is remembered as a teacher and mentor by many artists who have continued to but Alberta ceramics on the map, across the province but particularly in Medicine Hat. Plainsman Clays still exists, and the artist’s public commissions are an instant snapshot of large-scale civic ceramic work — plaques and reliefs — that was popular in mid-century, but like any artist who shied away from prolific public displays, he could be forgotten or he could be widely rediscovered. “I don’t think Luke’s legacy has yet come to fruition,” Christopher says.